Here's to Being Here

Arts & Crafts; 2008

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Jason Collett's two prevailing musical interests aren't just different, they're diametrically opposed. He's Humpty Dumpty and the king's men, pushing rock music over a ledge with Broken Social Scene, reassembling the pieces under his own name. And he draws a fairly strict line between these two manifestations of his music-- banjos on one side, distortion on the other-- although occasionally, a fugitive sound slips across the divide, such as the sequenced background twitter that underpins the clicky acoustic rock of "Roll on Oblivion", the first track on his new album. But by and large, there's no indication that Collett's two styles are heading for an intersection. His eponymous music is like an abandoned railway line-- an evocative relic from a bygone era-- running parallel to the newer, shinier tracks he's laying with Broken Social Scene.

As was the case with Collett's last album, Idols of Exile, his latest is a loving ode to his fellow Americana-obsessed Canadians in the Band. As a singer, charitable ears might hear Collett splitting the difference between Levon Helm's gritty soul and Rick Danko's cartoonish over-enunciation. Less charitable ones will notice that he's pilfered Bob Dylan's vocal tics wholesale, evoking an alternate universe where The Basement Tapes were the beginning of a long unbroken collaboration, not a prelude to divergence. "Southern gentleman and your Bonaparte ways," he keens on "Roll on Oblivion", "no need to get philosophic," the last vowel going reedy and nasal.

Like Dylan, Collett also likes to periodically let his vocal melodies flatten out into monochromatic smudges, as he does on the opening line of punchy rocker "Papercut Hearts". And he has a romantic attachment to highways, slum-dwellers, saints, harmonicas, and roadhouses. But all of this happens at the surface level, while at heart, Dylan and Collett are very different singers. Dylan has a way of feeling out his voice like a cautious swimmer probing uncertain depths: he pushes out into it, decides it feels okay, pushes a little further. Collett, quite simply, can sing, and lacks Dylan's sense of hesitancy and prodigious effort. His voice is naturally expressive and supple, capable of smoothly moving from a dusty wheeze to a weightless falsetto. When he sings, amid the smoky piano chords of "Henry's Song", that he's "drunk on the blood of luuuh-huuuv," it sounds more like an aesthetic choice than an impassioned loss of vocal control.

This mannered, understated virtuosity permeates Collett's music, just like it did the Band's. The simple hitch and glide of "Roll on Oblivion" gets dressed up with reverbed guitar leads, judicious fringes of maraca, and vocal echoes. The blues licks prickling through the lite-groove of "Sorry Lori" are downright foppish, and "Somehow", with its carefully tended disembodied harmonies, sounds like something Thom Yorke might make were his computer confiscated. Collett's songs seem to begin with emotional and melodic immediacy but end in embellishment. These highly polished exteriors, paired with his superficial similarities to Dylan, make Collett's music seem like an art of pure surface, no matter how sincere his declarations of heartbreak may be. This isn't a strike against him, because the surface is quite fine. It simply reveals a telling inversion: Collett's indie rock-- typically the province of irony and disaffection-- smolders with spontaneous inspiration, while his trad-rock, which is typically the province of direct emotional candor and raw-boned effusion, sounds more academic. Perhaps there's more of a dialogue happening between Collett's two personae than is immediately apparent.